2009:December

Wow. It’s been exactly a year since I last compiled a Groovee Playlist™. Well, I haven’t actually actively sought nice songs this past year so I haven’t had time to properly compile lists throughout the year. It’s only the past month or two that I tuned in to various sources to get my music fix. So let this be the extra-long 2009 special of the Groovee Playlist™. As much as possible, I only featured songs that were released or have become big in 2009 and I must note that this is not my Best of 2009 selection—I haven’t listened to as much music as I should have and I deliberately strove to have a diverse set of music to include in this list.

Last December 12, we had a Christmas OpenStreetMap Micro Mapping Party. The previous one was in Davao back in July and the first was in Tagaytay in May. Starting in 2010, we plan to have quarterly Mapping Parties at least in the Greater Manila Area. So if you’re interested to join one, there will be plenty of opportunities next year for you to do so.

We won! Team Bloggers, which consisted of Benj, Jeff, Hannah (whom I only met then), and me, conquered the 3rd Max Road Challenge, organized by 103.5 Max FM. The Road Challenge happened last Sunday, December 13, and had us traveling all the way from Caltex along Julia Vargas in Ortigas to Leslie’s Restaurant in Tagaytay.

Yay! I luckily got a free ticket to Paul van Dyk’s event last October 13 at A-Venue in Makati and which was organized by Bigfish Manila and sponsored by Nokia. The ticket came via a radio promo during the Bigfish Radio show, which airs on Magic 89.9 every Saturday night. The promo question at that instance I joined asked the listeners to name one album by Paul van Dyk. I e-mailed my answer, In Between and that got me one of the complimentary tickets! Thanks Bigfish!

I’ve had my ASUS Eee PC 701 for over a year but I never did replace the stock ASUS Xandros OS that came with it. That is, until about two months ago. I’ve been pretty contented with the default OS and I especially liked how blazingly fast it booted up and shut down. And just like Markku, I’ve been using it as a development PC for my latest website (still under wraps) and had installed XAMPP on it.